Best 1141 quotes in «historical quotes» category

For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.

For nearly two centuries, scholars and politicians have debated the future of capitalism. Its critics, most prominent among them Karl Marx, have seen capitalism as intrinsically unstable, full of contradictions that will lead eventually to its collapse. Its supporters see it as the best way to allocate resources and rewards. Some even hint that the democratic capitalistic society is not just a phase in the historical evolution of economic systems but its ultimate end.

For society as a whole, nothing comes as a "right" to which we are "entitled." Even bare subsistence has to be produced-and produced at a cost of heavy toil for much of human history. The only way anyone can have a right to something that has to be produced is to force someone else to produce it for him. The more things are provided as rights, the less the recipients have to work and the more others have to carry their load.

For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.

For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history.

For the sake of historical truth I must verify that only the Greeks, of all the adversaries who confronted us, fought with bold courage and highest disregard of death.

Fortifications, artillery, foreign aid - will be of no value, unless the ordinary soldier knows that it is HE guarding his country

For we cannot adequately understand 'man' as an isolated biological creature, as a bundle of reflexes or a set of instincts, as an 'intelligible field' or a system in and of itself. Whatever else he may be, man is a social and an historical actor who must be understood, if at all, in close and intricate interplay with social and historical structures

From a historical viewpoint, religion is just a kind of superstition, and from a political viewpoint it is a tool of social control.

Further global progress is now possible only through a quest for universal consensus in the movement towards a new world order.

Gentlemen, comrades, do not be concerned about all you hear about Glasnost and Perestroika and democracy in the coming years. They are primarily for outward consumption. There will be no significant internal changes in the Soviet Union, other than for cosmetic purposes. Our purpose is to disarm the Americans and let them fall asleep.

German dominance in the EU is a fact of life. But for historical reasons, it would be the last country to be swept away by a populist wave. And one thing is certain: If Germany goes down, Europe goes down, and with it all the values which we thought are worth living for. Germany has to be the champion of these values.

Given the ambiguity of religious texts and teachings, the mixed historical record, and the empirical evidence, it would be foolhardy to assert that religious faith necessarily upholds democratic values.

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people.

Grape juice at the communion table symbolizes the historical impotence of Christ’s blood, Christ’s gospel, Christ’s church, and Christ’s expanding kingdom. Grape juice stays ‘bottled up’, confined to the historical skins of Palestine.

Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent.

Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation, and he isn't yet historical.

Happiness is more effectually dispensed to mankind under a republican form of government than any other.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

Herschel Grynszpan's life was enigmatic, elusive and tragic. The traces he left on the historical record are just sufficient to tantalize and baffle historians. Harlan Greene has woven from these threads a riveting novel, erotic, haunting, and profoundly moving.

He who puts out his hand to stop the wheel of history will have his fingers crushed.

Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation.

Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.

Historical experience is written in blood and iron.

Historical and public memory is not merely on the side of domination.

Historical fiction is not only a respectable literary form; it is a standing reminder of the fact that history is about human beings.

Historical! Must it be historical to catch your attention? Even though historicity, like notoriety, denotes nothing more than thatsomething has occurred.

History, if thoroughly comprehended, furnishes something of the experience which a man would acquire who should be a contemporary of all ages and a fellow citizen of all peoples.

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.

History is a vast early warning system.

History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.

History is valuable, to begin with, because it is true; and this, though not the whole of its value, is the foundation and condition of all the rest. That all knowledge, as such, is in some degree good, would appear to be at least probable; and the knowledge of every historical fact possesses this element of goodness, even if it posses no other.

History is rooted in the future

History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.

History knows no resting places and no plateaus

History remembers only the celebrated, genealogy remembers them all.

Hocus was an old cunning attorney. The words of consecration, "Hoc est corpus," were travestied into a nickname for jugglery, as "Hocus-pocus." - John Richard Green, A Short History of the English People, 1874. see Charles Macklin.

Historical explanation is not identical with moral judgment.

Historical methodology, as I see it, is a product of common sense applied to circumstances.

historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.

HISTORICAL SLUMMING: the act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural villageslocations where time appears to have been frozen many years backso as to experience relief when one returns back to'the present'.

History distinguishes what is accidental and transitory in human nature from what is essential and immutable.

History has become more important than ever because of the to unprecedented ability of the historical sciences to take in man's life on earth as a whole.

History, in fact, is no more than a list of the crimes of humanity, human follies and accidents

History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions.